On 12/11/20 12:18 AM, Alex Perez wrote:
James Cameron wrote on 12/9/20 9:09 PM:
On Thu, Dec 10, 2020 at 07:13:49AM +0300, Srevin Saju wrote:
G'day!
I have a topic, which perhaps needs discussion,
It is about time this came up again.
Pretty much :)
:D
We have been using IRC for many years. Recently, some of our
communication moved to Slack, and some to Jitsi. What is Sugar
Labs's idea of a best, unified communication platform which it
should recommend to new developers. Right now, all the guides point
directly to IRC,
Yes, even my "How to get started as a Sugar Labs developer" points to
IRC.
Yes, the problem is, we recommend IRC, but we do not use it. There are
people who follow guides like this, set up everything on IRC with some
great difficulty, put some message out there in the channel, and receive
no reply. Yes, we are in different timezones, but perhaps we should
explicitly tell them to "stay around for 48 hours, we cannot reply
immediately" or something like that.
most new developers, who are interested to contributing to Sugar
drop a message to an IRC channel, and almost never get a reply. This
is possibly because the communication has diversified, or because of
a community split on the basis of communication medium.
It is easier to explain the lack of reply as being caused by a lack of
contributing members, and a focus by the remaining members on their
specific projects in a way that does not require collaborating in
real-time. The GitHub commit pattern over time confirms this.
Hmm
Recently, many new developers told us of the difficulties of using
IRC clients, the need for Bouncers, etc.
(a) my preference is not to call them developers until they have
contributed,
I assume they are supposed to be called contributors right? I mean "just
developers", not "Sugar developers"
Agreed. Until you've contributed something, you're just an interested
party. Simply aspiring to be a developer does not make you one.
(b) these barriers to using IRC do not seem difficult; above all, why
are we doing FreeNode's job for them?
In what way do you feel we're doing FreeNode's job for them? I don't get it.
If you are saying about matrix, just like freenode, they require
registration. They require registration unlike freenode. Freenode has
registration optional, but almost all matrix servers require
registration by an email address. So, all matrix users are registered.
Regarding the bouncer, its just because of the decentralized nature of
matrix. It is not a bouncer actually, it is just how it works, like
modern chat clients. The server remains connected to all freenode
channels in the world (not just #sugar), and we can opt in to join any
freenode channel we wish to.
We (some of us) suggested them to use a Matrix client to connect to
#sugar, and indeed they are quite satisfied with new mode of
communication.. The Matrix protocol.
Most recent discussion on #sugar was just you talking to cyksager, and
we couldn't see anything from them until they did something to fix it.
Yes, thats when Bernie suggested cyksagar to use matrix instead of
Sugar. Thats when I wrote to this channel. The matrix channel was not
very published. Many people did not know about it, but still there are
many people who have found the matrix channel on their own without us
telling them to: for example, jamescarter, icarito, _llaske, and
previously purhan
The Matrix protocol is interesting. Sugar had a matrix channel for
many years. Recently we set up a bridge between the matrix channel
(#sugar:matrix.org) and the IRC irc.freenode.net channel, i.e
(#sugar), which helped a few developers to keep connected to the IRC
channel without a bouncer and also make use of newer clients for
mobile, for example Element Android (available on F-droid, Google
Play), and Element iOS. Element / Matrix has a intuitive web client
which supports reactions and better formatting as compared to IRC,
and is the best place for a developer to start contributing. The
most interesting and useful feature is the IRC bridge, which helps
to make use of the best of Matrix and maintain the connection
between the IRC channel and the Matrix channel. The bridge is a tool
which helps to convert the IRC protocol to the matrix protocol and
vice versa.
Topic of discussion, we a Sugar Gitter channel, Sugarizer Matrix
channel, etc. Matrix has the support to integrate everything to a
single channel. What is your opinion?
While it may be a factually accurate statement that "we have had this
channel for years", that doesn't mean it's been trafficked/visited much
at all. For instance, I had no knowledge of its existence before several
months ago, when the IRC bridge was set up. The IRC channel has existed
since the inception of the Sugar Labs project. You may see IRC as an
antiquated protocol, and I have no problem with Sugar Matrix channel,
bridged to the IRC channel. But to show up and suggest that we eliminate
the primary real-time collaboration tool that the project has used since
its inception shows, frankly, somewhat of a lack of understanding of how
open source projects work. You need to learn to build consensus. If you
show up and, shortly thereafter, say "I don't like the way we
communicate", let's change it completely, you're inevitably going to
experience resistance. To expect anything else is nuts. We have mailing
lists for non-realtime communications. If you're e-mail averse, you will
not last long in any open source community.
I do not suggest that we replace IRC with Matrix. you might have got me
wrong. Matrix is the best to go along with IRC. Rather than we just have
IRC, we can also have matrix along with IRC and suggest them to users. I
would not myself give away IRC. I would still use IRC
Regarding this history of the matrix channel,... Matrix channel was
found by samtoday (Sam), and icarito (Sebastian), and it existed with
few members. Bernie introduced me to matrix during July, and we somehow
found that we had a channel called #sugar:matrix.org on matrix, and we
did not know. Next steps were, we asked icarito to kindly provide me and
bernie, admin privileges and we dusted out the channel, and connected
the matrix channel to IRC using a matrix bridge maintained by matrix.org
I had written to the mailing list, but I am sure it went unnoticed due
to the lack of context in my explanation
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2020-July/058555.html
My opinion is that you've got the cart before the horse. First thing
that is needed is for potential contributors to become developers, and
to collaborate on something.
Agreed. And honestly, if you can't follow basic directions on how to use
and connect to an IRC channel, I find it very, very unlikely that
newcomers will have the patience necessary to become meaningful
contributors.
Yes, I agree too. Matrix is also not meant to make it easy for new
contributors. It is only a future convenience. Being in touch with the
community without a bouncer, being able to answer people's questions
even when you are away from keyboard, for example over an Android/iOS
device, or anywhere from a web browser. Matrix includes the "basic
directions" but to connect to a matrix channel. Not all people have
bouncers though. A person might ask a question in the afternoon, but to
get the reply after he got disconnected.
The main problem is _not_ about a new communication platform. The
question is.. if we dont use IRC, or reply to a person's message, or if
we know that their questions will likely go unanswered, then shouldn't
we remove IRC from our preferred mode of communication. On "Getting
started as a Sugar Labs contributor" and sugar-docs/../contact.md, we
both mention IRC as our primary mode of contact. Maybe, we should
replace it with the mailing list, (as I have seen that the mailing list
has more conversation than IRC in the past 3-4 months) so that users can
reach out there instead of an IRC channel where they almost never get a
reply right? I am sure almost all questions on the mailing list get
answered by someone. Async.
Where you have potential contributors using IRC to ask questions that
are answered by documentation or source code; that's just a help line
or chat bot. It is often a waste of time to invest in that. Better
is to fix the problem they are reporting.
Agreed. It's not as though we have paid customer support/engagement
people to do anything with such complaints, anyways.
Agreed.
Interesting points of discussion and helpful material:
* Pull request to add Matrix as a communication medium
(https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar-docs/pull/203)
* Matrix Sugar Labs wiki page (https://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Matrix)
* Official matrix-irc guide
(https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-irc/wiki/Guide:-How-to-use-Matrix-to-participate-in-IRC-rooms)
As of now, many popular open source communities use Matrix as the
main mode of communication, and all the sister nodes bridged to the
matrix network For example:
* Fedora
* KDE
* Mozilla Thunderbird
It would be cool, if we discuss this among a wider range of
community, putting a lot of people's idea rather than two of us
discussion [cited]. So, I hope this topic, would be a good candidate
for the next SLOBS meeting.
An alternate way of looking at this is to avoid talking about
choice of communication tools, instead work toward;
- gathering people together,
- agreeing on the unmet needs, or technical debt, to be resolved,
- dividing up the work to be done,
- starting the work, and;
- tracking progress.
Agreed.
Agreed.
Things which I do not agree to:
* Splitting of the community on the basis of a mode of communication
* Documentation suggesting IRC, which almost never gets a reply,
otherwise, we have to explicitly ask them to stay around for 48 hours on
the channel and not leave hopeless
* Lack of transparency in what happens in sister projects of Sugar Labs
* Communication is becoming lesser and lesser transparent than what it
was when it was on IRC, or on mailing lists.
I am a fan of IRC. I like its simplicity. It is lightweight. I also like
matrix. I use both. During December 2019- January 2020, the IRC channel
was quite active.. you know :) Google Code-In.
Looking forward for Sugar Labs Code-In. :)
Regards
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Srevin Saju
https://srevinsaju.me
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